the infinite ego of Jobs

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ericbarbour
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the infinite ego of Jobs

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Feb 18, 2022 8:11 pm

from an email I sent to a friend's mailing list
I don't think there's a more obsessive monument to the ego of Steve Jobs on the internet.

https://www.apple1registry.com/index.html

The part that REALLY disgusts me: the "Market" section.

Only about 80 of them survived because many (most?) were bought by hobbyists who could not figure out how to make them work. All you got was a populated PC board; no case, no keyboard, no memory, no peripherals, and a primitive power supply, barely adequate. If you wanted a working machine, the Byte Shop and a couple of other companies could fix them up to run BASIC and put them in cabinets. I recall they charged about $2500 for a system in a wooden box with a 9" monitor, crummy 40-column printer from SWTPC (an Apple competitor lol), and cassette. Easy to imagine people in 1976 going "oh god, I can't afford that!" and for good reason: you could still buy a brand-new Toyota for less. It was pure amateur-hour stuff. Right thru the 80s no one cared about Apple Is, so most were tossed in the rubbish. Then in the 90s the hysteria started. Then after Jobs died, prices went berserk.

I clearly remember meeting an owner of an Apple I in the late 80s; he "spent a fortune" on it, which to his sad stoned-hippie mind would probably have been about $1000. And he never managed to make it boot into the BASIC ROM. It was a "clever hack" by Wozniak, and not really a "practical computer". They managed to hire more engineers, and thence devised the Apple II (also a clever hack, especially the floppy drive interface), which was far more like a usable commercial product.

But the II didn't happen because Woz was determined. If Jobs had not been a pushy, aggressive, sociopathic asshole, a good manipulator of crowds, and willing to walk over anyone to make "his company" succeed, Apple might have gone under long before the Lisa was conceived. There was no shortage of competition in 1976.

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Strelnikov
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Re: the infinite ego of Jobs

Post by Strelnikov » Sat Feb 19, 2022 9:00 am

Yes, I always thought the Apple I was for the ultimate hard-core late-'70s computer person because it was just a board and you had to give a keyboard, case, and (TV) monitor. The maniacs at MITS gave you a box with switches for your Altair 8800, fer Chrissake!
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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